A military incursion into Latin America. A war to control another country’s oil. A corrupt administration engineering spectacle (“We want a show”) to keep the public distracted. A visibly declining president whose background in acting and television turns governance into pantomime. A frozen economy. A pandemic roiling under the surface that the powerful would prefer to ignore.

We’re speed-running the lowlights of the Reagan and Bush I administrations, but worse.

A friend of mine suggested rather than protest, we just build an animatronic Christian Slater to post in the back of some smoky bar (I nominate the 9:30 Club) to mechanically raise a clove cigarette to his lips, repeating, “No blood for oil” and “Eat the rich” until the heat death of the universe.

We are a generation that’s been dismissed as cynical—more drenched in irony than sincerity. But the most important contribution of Generation X to the American discourse is that we dismissed the discourse before it excluded us. We diagnosed the ineffectiveness of working from the inside and governed ourselves accordingly. This may have looked like apathy, but it was rejection.

There’s a particular dark nostalgia that attaches to this moment. What I miss isn’t my youth so much as the version of me that thought standing apart meant something. The migraine of recognition comes from having once believed that rejection itself........

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